Google: force for good, force for evil.

Google Inc is an American corporation specialised in Internet search and online advertising.

Google’s mission statement is, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”Google’s corporate philosophy includes statements such as “Don’t be evil” and “Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun”, illustrating a somewhat relaxed corporate culture.

Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, video sharing…

Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%).Its increasing power and worldwide expansion raises some criticism and fears. Its business practices and services meet some controversies. For instance, Google Book Search aims at digitizing books and make the text searchable, which leads to the claim of author for the disrespect of copyright. We can also underline the cooperation with the governments of China for instance to filter search results depending to regional laws, this can be identified as censorship. Furthermore, Google’s persistent cookies and other private information collection have led to concernsabout users privacy.

A number of state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth’s satellite imaging.

To weight the pros and cons, we have to pay attention to Google’s penetration in our privacy space and check the storage and the use of our privacy data. But we can’t deny that Google provides us some really usefull and free services. However, we just have to keep an eye on the various Google’s purposes.